Grafana Synthetic Monitoring vs Sentry

Free tier available

From $26 per month (Team plan, indicative)

Cheap if you already run Grafana Cloud; results are plain Prometheus metrics you already know how to use.

Event-volume pricing. A noisy application can consume the quota quickly, so filtering matters.

Included in the Grafana Cloud free tier with a monthly check allowance.

Free developer plan with a monthly error and replay allowance.

Established

Grafana Labs · since 2021

Category standard

Functional Software (Sentry) · since 2012

• Results are Prometheus metrics, so alerting and dashboards use tools you already have.
• Same k6 scripts serve load testing and synthetic monitoring.
• Good free tier within Grafana Cloud.

• Release and commit attribution tells you which deploy introduced the error, and often who to ask.
• Excellent SDK coverage across essentially every language and framework.
• Self-hosting is genuinely supported for teams that need it.

• Assumes you are in the Grafana ecosystem; standalone it makes little sense.
• Browser checks are less mature than Datadog's or Checkly's.
• Fewer probe locations than the dedicated vendors.

• Event-based pricing punishes noisy applications until you invest in filtering.
• The product has broadened a lot; some newer modules are shallower than the error core.
• Self-hosting is resource-hungry.

Teams already running Grafana Cloud and k6.

Essentially every engineering team — error tracking is the highest-value monitoring you can add first.